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Cinema Is More Than Sad White Guys
The Golden Globe nominations reveal an industry that only awards “seriousness” to white men who tell stories we’ve already heard
“Im sorry this is all so self-pitying and boring,” Adam Driver says, late in Noah Baumbach’s new Netflix film, Marriage Story. By my count, this makes Driver’s character the first person to file an accurate review of Marriage Story: a dull, stagey, and wildly acclaimed fictionalization of Noah Baumbach’s divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. I probably would not have liked Marriage Story under the best of circumstances. That I hated it as much as I did comes down to timing: It is a movie that arrived, to great fanfare, right in the middle of a heated battle about how we define “cinema,” and it somehow seems to sum up everything that is wrong with the concept in 2019.
The Golden Globe nominations, which were announced on Monday, have already been pilloried for their sexism. This was a historically diverse year at the box office: 2019 was the first time all major studios released at least one film directed by a woman, yet the nominee list for that category is all male. It is also not lost on creators of color that after a relatively diverse slate of nominees at last year’s awards, the 2020 Globes are set to be almost entirely white. Even outside…
